


To Stare Down

by nothing_rhymes_with_ianto



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 05:40:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto/pseuds/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knows everything dies. He knows he's going to die someday. So he stares down a grinning empty face and contemplates the real question of mortality: when?</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Stare Down

**Author's Note:**

> It's literally been months since I wrote anything so I'm really sorry at how bad this is, I'm rusty. This was inspired by one of the photos in [this set](http://www.gbenard.com/conversations-around-the-table), you'll know it when you see it.

It’s dark outside. It’s dark in the kitchen, too. The overhead light burned out months ago and Grantaire has never bothered to replace it. A camping lantern is good enough. It’s not like he uses the kitchen much anyway. It stores his booze, and sometimes he comes in here to make ramen or whatever. But generally he just orders pizza or chinese or whatever comes to his drunken mind or whatever store is still open. So the kitchen is lit— barely— by a lantern in one corner of the counter, fuzzily illuminating the multitude of papers and dirty dishes and crumpled cigarette packs that litter the countertops.

Grantaire sits in a wooden chair at the kitchen table. A space has been cleared on the tiny surface for a stack of books put together haphazardly, but somehow lined up perfectly, as if by a loving hand that wasn’t too particular about whether small was stacked on large or not. Atop the books, a sheep skull grins, bleach-white and ominous, horns curling backward and around, eye sockets empty of life. And Grantaire sits, chin in hand, his white button-down stained and torn at one rolled-up sleeve, wrinkled and skewed, his jeans dirty and crumpled. He sits, and he stares into the smiling dead face of the sheep.

There is lead in his chest, and a hollowness in his head, and it feels like he can’t breathe, and his limbs feel heavy and light in succession. The pages of the books under the skull are yellowed, torn, used. The empty black holes in the head of the skull seem to bore into him, to see straight down into his chest and his brain and his eyes, into everything. The mouth laughs at him, mockingly, grinning at his fears. The horns curl back towards him, reaching, beckoning, pointing, accusing.

He knows he will die someday. He knows everything dies. It’s one of the few things he has no doubt of. In fact, it’s one of the few things he knows with such an absolutely certainty that he sometimes feels like he can sense each death in a single moment. Yes, he will die someday, and his pathetic, dirty little corpse will be tossed into a pit alongside so many others and left, and he will inevitably be forgotten. Because, really, he doesn’t deserve to be remembered in the least. He has done nothing with his life but allow addiction to run away with his existence and depression to run away with his brain and self-hatred to drip over and fill up the cracks.

And the bleating laughter echoing in his brain pulls at him. He can’t help but think of every time he’s fucked up, everything anyone has ever said to him, all the things that he’s been called, all the things he knows he is. His fingers curl around the edge of the table, white at the knuckles. Why does anyone ever even talk to him? Why does anyone ever pretend to like him? How did his parents even stand him for the first sixteen years of his life before he left? Why don’t people turn away from his face when he steps into a room? Why do they even sit there and listen to the shit that spews out of his mouth when he can’t make himself shut up, when he can feel the words flooding out in no order, for no reason other than to escape? He’s a piece of shit, he’s useless. He doesn’t understand why people even bother with him anyway. They’re all going to die too, there are so many better things they could do with their time and with their life. And his teeth grind down against themselves, creaking and rubbing like the breath that somehow forces itself out of his lungs.

And so he smokes a cigarette, just another ten minutes closer to death, and stares into the bleak knowing eyes of the skull. He’s going to die someday. When? When is he going to die? He’d rather dictate his own disappearance from existence than be surprised by it, rather decide when it’s time to go than sit around on his lazy ass with his booze-soaked brain and wait until he’s infirm and aching in more places than just the holes in his chest. The sheep grins at him. It’s his choice, which path he takes. Does he have the strength? For which one? The darkness stretches back and back on either side and it makes Grantaire shake, makes him want to curl into a ball on the cool kitchen floor and weep, makes him want to scream, makes him want to scratch his skin off until there’s nothing left of himself because then there would be no decision, there would be no ominous existence facing off against threatening non-existence.

There’s something simultaneously terrifying and calming about being frozen to a chair, smoking away pieces of life and confronting the grinning, empty face of death. It’s like being asleep, like floating away on a terrible black undercurrent and letting it take him. It hurts, it aches, it makes him want to flee, yet he wishes he could sit here and stare at it forever. He wants to turn on the light, but it’s broken and useless and he’s tired, so tired. So he flicks the stub of his cigarette away and runs nicotine-stained fingers through his hair, feeling the breath sigh out harsh through his lips, and stares back into the abyss, a thought in his head that maybe he’d have some light if someone came over and opened the front door.


End file.
